As New Hampshire’s hospitals begin to fill up with COVID-19 patients, there’s no longer any doubt that a fall wave has begun again. And if that’s not enough, it looks like flu season will return in full force after a two-year hiatus. .
“Many of us can’t stand the thought that we’re still in those battles, still in those trenches, but we are,” said Dr. Brown. Elizabeth Talbot, infectious disease specialist affiliated with Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. Two fronts. . . . We have to locate that courage, we have to locate that strength, to move forward.
Talbot spoke Thursday at a webinar organized through a new organization called GoTruthNH, which has been formed to prevent all misinformation about vaccines and other medical practices. They organize normal webinars; Visit (gotruthnh. com) for more information.
I’m pessimistic about the ability of facts and logic to convince those who jumped on the anti-vaccine bandwagon, but it’s worth it. At the very least, GoTruthNH can prevent other undecided people from deceiving themselves.
The webinar, which featured state epidemiologist Dr. Benjamin Chan, taught me a few things.
The first is that COVID’s most likely transition to a seasonal respiratory challenge like the flu is why there is no stress on requiring COVID vaccines to attend public school.
Dr. Chan noted that mandatory school vaccines like TDAP (tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis or pertussis) provide lifelong or long-term coverage rather than the disease of a single shot or a short series of shots. COVID’s continued ability to produce new variants and subvariants makes it most likely that they will eventually launch a reformulated COVID vaccine in the fall, just as they do with the flu, and for better or worse, we never needed flu shots in school.
Another thing I learned is that rest before getting the last booster (waiting 3 months after your last COVID vaccine and two months after getting COVID) is not a protection issue. Getting an early booster probably wouldn’t overload our immune formula and it might not do anything wrong. It is recommended to wait only to maximize the length of time we have the most productive immune response.
“It’s not because it’s harmful (to get the recall sooner), it’s because it can be useless,” Dr. Talbot said. “If it’s convenient to get the reminder even if you’re just done having COVID, because you’re going through doing something high-risk like hosting holiday events, overlook it. “
This includes other people taking preventive medicines such as monoclonal antibodies or taking antivirals such as Paxlovid to combat symptoms.
As for the fall surge, the COVID numbers are clear. After a summer hiatus, the number of other people hospitalized with variants and subvariants of the SARS-CoV2 virus has nearly doubled in the past three weeks. anytime since February.
Still, that doesn’t mean we’re doomed to repeat the winter of 2021, when more than 450 people were hospitalized with COVID at some point. “We have more equipment at our disposal now. . . of the ones we had then or in 2020. “” Dr. Chan said, discussing the remedies that have been developed.
And reinforcement, of course, that might not possibly prevent you from catching COVID, but can, as Dr. Talbot put it, make the difference between “having some colds and being on a ventilator. “
As for the flu, it doesn’t seem to have affected us yet (the Department of Health and Human Services’ weekly flu activity report classifies it as “sporadic”), but Dr. Chan noted that it was severe south of the equator. indication of how soon things will be here.
“Southern Hemisphere flu season is our summer season. They saw very high degrees of flu,” he said.
There, as here, the flu has been mild for two seasons, thanks to all the efforts we have made to prevent the spread of COVID. As a result, everyone’s herbal immunity against the flu will be weaker than usual.
As noted above, our two-year respite from the flu shows that all the COVID behavior we’ve had enough of — hand washing, social distancing, wearing a mask in public — is working very well. If there is nothing else, the return of the flu is some other explanation for why.
David Brooks is a journalist and of the science/technology column Granite Geek and the blog granitegeek. org, as well as moderator of science Cafe Concord events. After earning a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, he became a journalist and performed in Virginia and Tennessee. before spending 28 years in Nashua Telegraph. Se joined the Monitor in 2015.